June (11/12): Uncharted 4In what could be the last game in the popular action adventure series, Uncharted 4 may just well be the best of the series. Naughty Dog is just better at this than anyone else. When it comes to matching narrative and gameplay, creating an interactive experience where you can be the participant and the audience, they just nail the balance right and Uncharted 4 does it better than any other edition in the series.
The story centers on Nathan Drake once again, famous explorer and adventurer now retired and living a quiet life of domestic bliss with the love of his life Elena. Although, it's not too easy for him, as he yearns to go back into adventuring rather than getting stuck with paperwork. That all gets turned on it's head once his older brother Sam, once thought dead, comes back into his life unexpectedly and it's to drag Nathan back onto the trail of treasure belonging to the notorious pirate Henry Avery. Nathan has sworn off the fortune-hunting life, but Sam's life is at stake, which eventually pulls Nathan in to seeking out the treasure on a globe trotting adventure.
Going into this, I was most curious about what the story would be like. The game itself seemed like it had a difficult period during development where the series writer and creative director Amy Hennig left, as well as the director of the game. They were replaced by The Last of Us' leads Neil Druckmann and Bruce Straley and, according to star Nolan North, swathes of Hennig's story and months of work were scrapped. So it was interesting to me to see what tone the story would be. Would they stick to the series roots with high octane Hollywood movie esque action and set piece moments with the down to earth good humor and sentimentality or maybe strip it away and focus on something darker in tone? The truth is somewhere in the middle. Where Uncharted 4 differs from the previous games and in an obvious touch from The Last Of Us, is that the story is grounded in the characters and the relationships between them. As good as Uncharted 2 is, you couldn't help but feel that it was a series of set pieces thrown together with a story built to serve around it. Like I said, that's fine, earlier games were on another level in terms of structure, plotting and tone, it's just that what we have here in Uncharted 4 take a different approach and places the emphasis on the characters. I've always enjoyed Nathan, Elena and Sully and their banter between them but Uncharted 4 allows these characters, including fresh faces, to shine. You get insight into their true natures and desires to stay with each other, even if Nathan is such a mess of conflicting motivations and desires. It results in Uncharted 4 being a game that's paced very differently, the first half of the game, particularly the beginning, has quite a few sections where there's very little action happening. In truth, the game has a pacing issue at the beginning of the game because it's fairly slow, but it picks up a few hours in to make a consistently excellent adventure. Ultimately I really like the balance, the quiet sections means that the action hits home that much harder.
The spectacle comes from Naughty Dog's attention to detail, incredibly rendered landscapes that are fully explorable from intricately detailed buildings and ruins that impressed me the more I further I got into the game. Again and again, the game shifts emphasis from combat to puzzle solving to climbing platforms to exploration, interspersed with cinematics to let you have a breather. There are new additions this time round such as the grappling hook. It allows for greater variation in world traversal while also used as a tool in combat. Instinctively deciding to take a risk by using the grappling hook to swing from one point to another as enemies are shooting at you, only to swing just far enough for you to fall and land an instant knockout punch on an enemy is every bit as exciting as you would imagine it to be. It also opens up the maps wonderfully, creating real playgrounds to explore and find secrets or hidden notes which rewards you with game bonuses.
The open nature of the playgrounds also feeds into Uncharted's new mechanic of stealth. As Nathan is more agile than Joel from The Last of Us, you're free to leap and jump between cover, hide in tall grass and choosing your moment to take an enemy down. Nathan and the crew are against a private army, so the odds should feel stacked against you that using stealth is a viable option and while it's satisfying, playing it on hard like I did seemed impossible to follow through completely. I assume lower difficulties have fewer enemies to deal with as it seemed impossible for me to take someone down without being spotted most of the time. I learned to accept it and use stealth as far as I could and if I got spotted then I would get into the firefight and use the environment to my advantage. It's as close to an Indiana Jones adventure as you can get. There is puzzle solving but they're pretty brief and not particularly challenging.
Last to mention is the jeep. A little before the halfway point, you get to drive one around an environment. It's a neat addition, it's fast, fun and opens up it's own smaller puzzles to deal with. For example, you have to use the winch at certain points to get the jeep up a particularly muddy slope and so you have to get out of it and run and jump your way up and across until you find a sturdy tree to use as an anchor to drag it up. It's these sections that also makes you appreciate the level design, gorgeous environments that leaves you in awe over just how much time, skill and money it takes to create something of this scale.
I also have to mention the multiplayer as it's enough on it's own to keep me away from Overwatch sometimes. It's not a heavyweight onling experience and it does nothing fancy at all but it is a lot of fun. Respawns are fast, loadouts kept pretty simple but offer a lot of variety in what you can get. It's the flipside of the coin, where single player is dictated by logic and physics and plot, in multiplayer it's pure insanity. Totems that can drain the life out of your enemies, a magic lamp that allows you to dash like the Flash and being able to summon AI partners out of thin air to help in the fight are commonplace within tightly constructed maps amongst gunfire and explosions. They are making good already on promises with continuing to support the multiplayer with free maps, gear, weapons etc so there's a good platform there to build upon.
Overall, the combat can maybe feel a little loose and perhaps the setpieces aren't as grandiose as falling out of an airplace, but the construction of it all is much more impressive than it has been before. This is without a doubt one of the best looking games I have ever played, not just in terms of graphical fidelity, but scene composition, camera positioning and lighting. It boggles my mind that there are assets and environments built which are so detailed in themselves that they could serve as great backdrops to games in themselves and yet they are never seen in the game again. It's been true of all the Uncharted games but to see it here, looking the best it's ever been and in the longest Uncharted game there has been, is something special. There's so much that goes into making every aspect shine that creates a masterful piece of storytelling, packed with jaw dropping scenes as well as touching character moments backed up by the always impressive cast of Nolan North, Troy Baker and Emily Rose. As a celebration and fond farewell of what the Uncharted series has offered, I really couldn't have asked for too much more.
9/10